Patton Oswalt’s 20 favorite books

On Twitter this evening, comedian Patton Oswalt, who just won a Grammy for “Talking for Clapping” (congrats!), shared his 20 favorite books on Twitter. I love it when artists share their inspirations; getting them to do so is one of the reasons I created the /Filmcast.

I’m embedding Oswalt’s tweets below, then providing a linked list of them for easy access (links are via Amazon Smile). I’m looking forward to checking some of these out.

The 80-20 rule of trolls 

Annalee Newitz at Ars Technica has a write-up on a new report by Jigsaw (an arm of Alphabet) and Wikipedia, which seeks to identify the sources of online abuse in Wikipedia comments:

The researchers unleashed their algorithm on Wikipedia comments made during 2015, constantly checking results for accuracy. Almost immediately, they found that they could debunk the time-worn idea that anonymity* leads to abuse. Although anonymous comments are “six times more likely to be an attack,” they represent less than half of all attacks on Wikipedia. “Similarly, less than half of attacks come from users with little prior participation,” the researchers write in their paper. “Perhaps surprisingly, approximately 30% of attacks come from registered users with over a 100 contributions.” In other words, a third of all personal attacks come from regular Wikipedia editors who contribute several edits per month. Personal attacks seem to be baked into Wikipedia culture.

The researchers also found that an outsized percentage of attacks come from a very small number of “highly toxic” Wikipedia contributors. A whopping 9% of attacks in 2015 came from just 34 users who had made 20 or more personal attacks during the year. “Significant progress could be made by moderating a relatively small number of frequent attackers,” the researchers note. This finding bolsters the idea that problems in online communities often come from a small minority of highly vocal users.

This data reinforces something many of us already suspected: The harshest trolls aren’t necessarily more numerous — they’re just louder than everyone else.

Finishing ‘Six Feet Under’ twelve years later

When Alan Ball’s Six Feet Under was airing on TV, it was my obsession, right along with The Sopranos. It was the golden age of HBO. Serialized TV was just starting to go mainstream, and the idea of a television show that was as emotionally deep (not to mention as good looking) as a film and was still relatively novel. I remember asking my parents to tape episodes of the show on VHS, because I was in college at the time and didn’t have access to HBO. That’s how deep my love ran for Six Feet Under.

Unfortunately, I never completed the five-season journey with the Fisher family the first time around. I don’t recall why I stopped, but I never made it through the whole of season four (I dropped off right around the time when David was brutalized by a hitchhiker).

Recently, I’ve been taking stock of my viewing experiences and trying to figure out what shows it’s important for me to complete. It always bothered me that I never finished Six Feet Under, primarily because I’d heard that the show’s series finale was one of the best in TV history.

So this past week, I fired up the HBO Go (or Amazon Prime streaming, depending on your pleasure) subscription and picked up watching right where I left off.

It’s a pretty surreal experience to immerse yourself into the lives of characters you left behind more than a decade ago. But I actually think jumping in mid-way through season four was a great way to resume watching the show. It gave me enough time to really get invested again and appreciate what the show did well. But it also wasn’t so many episodes that I could get tired of the show again, and let its weaknesses really get to me.

Even after all this time, the show still feels groundbreaking. It was one of the first times a gay relationship was shown on screen in a really compelling and humanizing way. All the characters feel like actual people, and are depicted with complexity and compassion. More importantly, all of their problems are imbued with massive significance. This show has a lot to say about life and love, and it does so in ways that I still find effective. I wasn’t ready for all the feelings this show could stir up but it definitely still got to me on a very deep level.

That being said, this is a show that seems to have clearly run out of ideas around season four. The show’s structure was ambitious: every episode opened with a character’s death, and the ensuing episode had the Fishers dealing with that death and its funeral, while hopefully learning important lessons about themselves. This was understandably a difficult format to sustain for years, and by the end, the show seemed to just completely give up on it. It led to opening deaths that actually felt quite cruel to the audience. In one episode, a man’s home is robbed and then he is mercilessly executed for no reason. The audience never learns more about this situation. Who are these people? Why did the show make us feel for them, if it wasn’t going to tell us anything about them? These questions didn’t need answers in earlier seasons when the show actually went much further into depth on these “opening death characters.”

[SPOILERS for Six Feet Under begin now]

Moreover, the Fishers gradually became less and less likable over time, to the point where by the end of the show, many of them were unbearable. Nate cheated on Brenda, then broke up with her on what ended up being his death bed. David was emotionally abusive to his longsuffering partner Keith, who put up with David well past the point of reason. Claire turned out to be as unstable as Nate in dealing with death and acted out in incredibly self-destructive ways. Ruth was prone to fits of anger, allowing her suppressed emotions to come out in random bursts against Claire and others.

When I started watching Six Feet Under, I used to think these were characters I’d be blessed to know in real life. I wanted to hang out with them, be friends with them, be part of that crazy Fisher funeral home and witness all the humanity that transpired. By the end of the show, I didn’t even want to know these people anymore. I found them distasteful, self-absorbed, and self-destructive. I actively didn’t want to know them because if I did, they’d probably ruin my life in some way.

I wasn’t a fan of these developments, but I admired the show for creating such awful people and daring us to still care about them.

Here are a few more observations about the end of the last season and a half of the show:

  • The idea of the characters all talking to dead people and the elaborate visions they had got very tiresome by the end. I appreciated that these “visions” were meant to reflect the deepest thoughts of these characters, but I kept getting distracted by the conceit — did all of these characters (even ones not in the family, like Brenda) just have a thing where they interacted with mental projections regularly? It started to take me out of the show.
  • James Cromwell’s character of George had a really powerful arc in season four. The idea of a woman like Ruth feeling bitter about being forced to take care of an old partner with dementia was a potent one. I was really disappointed it ended with George mysteriously getting completely better and Ruth being forced to contend with the same issues about George’s emotional unavailability. In real life, we know things typically don’t end that way for seniors with Alzheimer’s and related ailments.
  • The season four finale was absolutely ludicrous and actively hurt the show. It was straight out of a soap opera, which I know is a funny thing to say because the show itself is structured and feels kind of like a really classy soap opera. But the aftermath of Lisa’s death and the idea that it could’ve been a murder was done so poorly that it almost caused me to stop watching the show again. It felt like it was completely out of a different series, and the fact that later episodes barely acknowledge it makes me feel like the showrunners agreed with this assessment.
  • Season five is mostly a slog, with an insane amount of time devoted to Claire’s temp job (a plotline that, in my opinion, went nowhere) but when Nate Fisher suffers from another AVM, the show roars to life again. The stakes are raised and things actually begin happening once more. The way Nate’s death is handled is beautiful and moving, right through his green funeral. What a lovely way to conclude the story of a beloved character.
  • The conclusion of Federico and Vanessa’s storyline was so beautiful. They are among the most “normal” people of the entire show and seeing their marriage fall apart and get reconstituted was hopeful and inspiring.
  • I appreciated what the final sequence was trying to do, but it just didn’t work for me. Everything about it: the old age makeup, the “future” styles and technology, the over-acting on the part of the characters who were dying. It all just felt silly and prevented me from emotionally investing in these characters’ future deaths. That being said, the series finale is an otherwise excellent hour of television that satisfyingly wraps up the whole show. A worthy end to one of the greatest shows in TV history.

For further writing on Six Feet Under, check out Heather Havrilesky’s write-up of the finale. It’s probably my favorite analysis of the show as a whole.

SNL and the logic of interviewing Kellyanne Conway

SNL delivered a mixed bag of an episode with guest Alec Baldwin last night, but there were a couple sketches that really stood out. The first is the cold open with Melissa McCarthy as Sean Spicer, which continues to be a highlight. The second is this bit about Jake Tapper and Kellyanne Conway:

I was surprised the Conway/CNN kerfuffle had risen to the level of SNL parody, but it is an interesting one to me: CNN passed on having Kellyanne Conway on “State of the Union” last week, a fact that Conway disputed. Why? Because the journalistic value of interviewing Conway has become suspect.

Jay Rosen has been on the anti-Conway warpath for awhile, and he makes some pretty astute observations about how journalists should treat Conway. In an interview with Recode, Rosen lays out his reasoning:

I don’t think the people interviewing Kellyanne Conway know why they’re doing that, meaning that the journalistic logic of it is growing dimmer with every interview […]

The logic is, “This is a representative of the president. This is somebody who can speak for the Trump administration.” If we find that what Kellyanne Conway says is routinely or easily contradicted by Donald Trump, then that rationale disappears. Another reason to interview Kellyanne Conway is our viewers want to understand how the Trump world thinks. If what the end result of an interview with her is is more confusion about what the Trump world thinks, then that rationale evaporates.

 

Data science and the Statue of Liberty

Clive Thompson has a great post on his blog about “The New Colossus, ” Emma Lazarus’s poem about the Statue of Liberty, welcoming immigrants into the country:

You have, without doubt, heard this part:

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”

They’re genuinely stirring lines! American politicians and businesspeople love to quote them, because they beautifully evoke the image of America as a worldwide beacon of liberty. Listen to any speech about immigration, and you’ll hear this passage.

But the poem doesn’t end there. The Statue of Liberty goes on to describe, in more depth, the type of immigrants she’s talking about. Let’s extend the quote a bit further:

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.”

“The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.” Now, that is a gut-punch of a line. (Purely as a matter of verse, the way those iambs land on the rhyming syllables of the first two words — the WRE-tched RE-fuse — is like a pneumatic naildriver. WHAM WHAM WHAM! I love it.)

But the point is, this additional line complicates the political picture a bit, doesn’t it?

As time has gone on, the “masses yearning to breathe” line has become much more prevalent in our literature and writings. The “wretched refuse” line? Not so much.

The “wretched refuse” line isn’t much talked about these days, both because a lot of people don’t even know it exists, and because it’s politically inconvenient. As Thompson explains, we like to talk about immigrants who are the best and the brightest, and who add value and innovation to our country. The original poem conceived of compassion as an end in and of itself.

It reminds me of this Bible passage in Matthew 25:

When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.

Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in,  I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

 The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’

As the immigration battle rages this year, I think it will be a good sentiment to keep in mind.

 

The stupefying odds

A spectacular data visualization by The Pudding shows how difficult it is for a band to break out and make it big:

The vast majority of bands never do make it. Acts break up, give up or decide they have other things they want to do with their lives.

For every Chance the Rapper there are thousands of rappers that never play a show with more than a couple hundred people. For every Lake Street Dive, there are hundreds of promising bands that break up because they lost on their members.

To see the NYC concert trajectory of different bands, below you can search for any of the 3,000 bands that played a show in 2013, and at least one more show from 2014 to 2016. Perhaps some of them are on their way to making it, and it just hasn’t happened yet.